Priya Nair
Data Scientist ยท Machine Learning & Analytics
Seattle, United States
About
Data Scientist with 6 years of experience building machine learning models and analytics pipelines for e-commerce and fintech products. Trains and deploys models in Python with Scikit-learn and PyTorch, from feature engineering through A/B testing in production, and explains the results to people who will never read the notebook. Recent work includes a recommendation engine and a fraud model that lifted recall from 71% to 89%.
Experience
- Cascade Metricsยท Senior Data ScientistSeattle, WA (hybrid)Mar 2023 โ Present
- Own the recommendation engine trained on 200M interaction events in PyTorch, lifting click-through on recommended items 18%.
- Ran pricing experiments with A/B testing and statistical analysis in Python that informed a change adding $2.1M in annual revenue.
- Moved model training to AWS SageMaker with feature engineering pipelines in Spark, cutting retraining time from 9 hours to 90 minutes.
- Mentor two junior data scientists and review every model before it ships, including bias checks on protected attributes.
- Wrote the model monitoring dashboard that flags drift, catching two silent degradations before customers noticed.
- Northstar Retail Analyticsยท Data ScientistSeattle, WAJul 2020 โ Feb 2023
- Improved fraud detection recall from 71% to 89% with an XGBoost model and better feature engineering on transaction history.
- Built ETL jobs orchestrated with Airflow that moved daily analysis from ad hoc scripts to a Snowflake warehouse.
- Queried and modeled 3 TB of clickstream data with SQL and Spark to segment customers for the marketing team.
- Ran statistical analysis for 40 product experiments a year and wrote the experiment guidelines the company adopted.
- Bright Path Research Labยท Data Analyst / Research AssistantSeattle, WASep 2018 โ Jun 2020
- Ran statistical analysis for two university-funded studies in Python, contributing figures to two published papers.
- Built data visualization for study results in Matplotlib and presented findings to a faculty review board.
- Maintained reproducible Jupyter analyses under Git for five research projects.
Education
- University of Washingtonยท M.S. Data ScienceData ScienceSep 2018 โ Jun 2020
Coursework: machine learning, deep learning, statistical inference. Teaching assistant for Applied Regression Analysis.
- Oregon State Universityยท B.S. StatisticsStatisticsSep 2014 โ Jun 2018
Projects
- fraud-detect-labยท Creator and maintainerhttps://github.com/priya-nair-dev/fraud-detect-lab
Open-source reinforcement learning experiment for adaptive fraud thresholds, combining deep learning models with a lightweight Flask API. Documented in a write-up referenced by 40+ practitioners.
Certifications
- Google Data Analytics Professional Certificate ยท Google (2021)
- AWS Certified Machine Learning โ Specialty ยท Amazon Web Services (2024)